P.S. In retrospect, I wish I’d asked someone in the room to take a photo of me cutting the cord. Of course sis, the nurses and doc all hand their hands full! : )

as for creating on the fly… well, it certainly does have its benefits… speed of result (for very short programs) is definitely one of the benefits… but coding on the fly becoming a “default position” is a position we should question with intense measure!

i wonder if communications is going to become like “IT hacking” currently is… with the “script kiddies” and the “real hackers”… “script kiddies” do get into a lot of places, but the “real hackers” know how the basics work and have a depth of understanding - but can still use the scripts (and in most cases write the scripts/software that the script kiddies use). looks to me like “communication” is going in very much the same direction… there is the “real communicators” that use technology without hesitation, but know that its not a substitute for “face to face” but a very good addition, and then there is those that think being able to communicate online “is the complete experience in itself”!

I’m very much into Twittering myself - but now I’m wonder if I’d ever consider ‘micro-life-logging’ some of the special milestones of my life?

Has anyone Twittered their wedding ceremony or child’s bar mitzvah?

The web really does allow people to connect in amazing ways.

Thanks, Allison Miller
Adelaide, South Australia
http://twitter.com/theother66

Hi there Mage! I’m no codemonkey but I would imagine that coding on the fly using Perl could also have other benefits around innovation and creativity not found in a more methodical approach. So while you might not work that way all the time, it could be something good to practice, perhaps even on a weekly basis? And something that should be a constant, invisible thinking process happening while a coding guru creates a structured, stable, well thought out plan.

I liked the questions you ask:
“are we doing that at the cost of the ability to be with “ourselves” or “with the moment at the moment in the moment”.
It’s a question I asked when people starting carrying mobile phones everywhere. Everybody has different priorities and sensibilities.

A bit of hope for you…Last year I was speaking to some students from Melbourne Uni’s Organisational Change course and asked how many use Instant Messaging. The response was…”nah, that is just so..high school. We would rather catch up face to face.”

A very good post full of insight. I cannot help but think that such use of technology is a double edge sword.

Firstly, i just want to clarify that i believe based on your post, Douglas used the medium in quite a sensible way - as he mentions, he tweeted the process, and not necessarily the intimate moments - he took the time to “have them, rather than share them”!

Perl is a language that is built for the gods, and programmed in by us two legged beasts It really is a brilliant language… one of the paradigm’s of perl is - “there is more than one way to do it!”. I have yet to come across another major language so flexible in its semantics - the coder can really many times, “go with the flow and code on the fly” without having to prepare too much of the architecture, as the flexibility of the language, lends itself to altering programs mid way without necessarily having to change the structure.

Therein lies its greatest strength and its most formidable weakness. I claim that “it’s easy to be a bad programmer in perl” - its possible to be a very good one, but easy to be a bad one. Good programs do take “thinking time” and architectural decisions at the right moments, bad programs improvise with global variables and “mixed bag programming”.

If a “quick and dirty” script is what you really require, the code won’t matter at the end of the day as you will have used it and thrown it away, but for anything more meaningful, time for reflection is needed (some masters can code beautifully on the fly, but they are the exceptions and not the rule!).

Let me now take this analogy for tweeting everything… there are moments you want light hearted tweets and fun or just updates about various bits, but for most of us, are we doing that at the cost of the ability to be with “ourselves” or “with the moment at the moment in the moment”.

Is not the “communication channel” (be it one way) not fulfilling a mental dependence on our part on the need to be connected. Are we loosing the ability to be “at peace with ourselves” and always needing to be “in touch”.

Is all we are doing “quick and dirty coding” and not “good reflective architectural decisions”?

I don’t know about everyone else, but being male probably puts me in the category of “can only focus on one thing at a time” :-), perhaps others can give a 100% attention to more than one thing at the same time… i know i can’t though, and i dare say, most people probably can’t… so i think we need to adapt to technology, but not without and understanding of how it might be impeding on the current way, so that we can take time out to ensure we don’t loose our current strengths and abilities, and yet gain the amazing ability new abilities that new technology surely brings.

Having said all this, I have used social media in a way that is similar to Scoble — and it is highly effective. A member of my family was in hospital after a near fatal bike accident and I used a blog to keep family and friends in the loop. It grew very quickly and was soon generating >1000 visitors per day from all over the world. Amazing confluence of events and technology. And it made all our lives easier at a difficult point in time.